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The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.
Alan Watts
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Alan Watts
Age: 58 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 6
Died: 1973
Died: November 16
Anglican Priest
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Kent
England
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More quotes by Alan Watts
Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
Alan Watts
The world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of a dangerous cure like the Pasteur serum for rabies.
Alan Watts
Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
Alan Watts
There is a deep, peaceful calm in the dawning of a new day.
Alan Watts
Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.
Alan Watts
Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.
Alan Watts
To define is to limit, to set boundaries, to compare and to contrast, and for this reason, the universe, the all, seems to defy definition....Just as no one in his senses would look for the morning news in a dictionary, no one should use speaking and thinking to find out what cannot be spoken or thought.
Alan Watts
Courage is the goal of cowards.
Alan Watts
Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.
Alan Watts
I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor.
Alan Watts
Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
Alan Watts
No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary.
Alan Watts
Increasingly, we're developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it.
Alan Watts
There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.
Alan Watts
There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to get culture or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.
Alan Watts
When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.
Alan Watts
A holy person is someone who is whole who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.
Alan Watts
Nothing is more creative than death, since it has the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that 'I' cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it.
Alan Watts
And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is.
Alan Watts
We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
Alan Watts